Digging up interesting fragments among the leaves of new, used, and out-of-print books

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Happy Birthday, Lou Gehrig!

The Iron Horse is 105 today. He died a little over 66 years ago on June 2, 1941. Twenty-three years later, in 1964, I made my first trip to the school library (2nd grade) and selected Lou Gehrig: Boy of the Sandlots, by Guernsey Van Riper; Bobbs-Merril, 1959. This selection coincided with my beginning Little League Baseball. I was eight years old and in love with the sport. Lou Gehrig became my hero after I read this Childhood of Famous Americans classic.

Several decades later, before I got into bookselling and more serious collecting, I learned there was an edition that preceded the edition I grew up with. The first edition was published in 1949, same publisher (Bobbs-Merrill). It was illustrated with silhouettes instead of pictures. I could not relate to this or any other of the silhouette books in the series. I grew up with the reprints, and, as a collector now, I still look for and prefer the reprints, whose jackets of soft colors and basic geometric shapes never fail to provide me with a burst of pleasant nostalgia. I do collect the first editions, but they don't create that connection with my childhood like the later printings do.

Here are a few other Gehrig biographies from my collection. These are a bit harder to find than other books written about him.

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Every new search is a voyage to the Indies, a quest for buried treasure, a journey to the end of the rainbow; and whether or not at the end there shall be turned up a pot of gold or merely a delightful volume, there are always wonders along the way. -Vincent Starrett (from Penny Wise and Book Foolish)